Friday, February 03, 2006

"When the sixties dawned, one thing seemed sacred. The functionalism that the Bauhaus and the Modernist pioneers had given to the world in the 1930s was not up for grabs. In architecture and design, form must follow function. There was no room for decoration, disposability or frivolity. The purism of the new age allowed no sense of humour."

"In 1955, Florence Knoll had put back into production the classic Bauhaus furniture dsigns of the pre-war Modernists, notably Mies van der Rohe and Marcel Breuer, and there was a ready market for them." ... (1960s Writer) Tom Wolfe said that being invited to dinner was, "in this haven of functionalism", potentially dangerous. Wolfe says that Mies van der Rohe's ubiquitous S-shaped, tubular-steel, cane-bottomed chairs were so functional that by the time the main course had arrived, at least one guest had been pitched face-first into the lobster bisque."

- Sixties Source Book; A Visual Reference To The Style of a New Generation, by Nigel Cawthorne

This weeks topic is chair. I chose to do a modern chair (too literal?) from the post-war era. I love the Eames/Knoll style of chair and have a few such "pieces" in my apartment. However, they, admittedly, aren't the most comfortable things to sit in. Funnily enough, they were supposedly made for form to follow function. It turned out the other way around. Under the picture is a blurb from a book I recently read on 1960's style of architecture and interior design, which seemed to surmise pretty precisely my own constant battle in my brain with aesthetics versus comfort and happiness.